Self-Agency and Self-Ownership in Cognitive Mapping

The concepts of agency of one's actions and ownership of one's experience have proved useful in relating body representations to bodily consciousness. Here we apply these concepts to cognitive maps. Agency is defined as ‘the sense that I am the one who is generating the experience represented on a cognitive map’, while ownership is defined as ‘the sense that I am the one who is undergoing an experience, represented on a cognitive map’. The roles of agency and ownership are examined with respect to the transformation between egocentric and allocentric representations and the underlying neurocognitive and computational mechanisms; and within the neuropsychiatric domain, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other memory-related disorders, in which the senses of agency and ownership may be disrupted.